“But the business will live or die on how well the technology works. Unlike a film, a video game is an interactive experience. The computer running it must react instantly to the user’s input, or the game will feel sluggish. When hundreds of miles separate players from the devices crunching the numbers, that gets tricky. If the round trip from a player’s device to a data-centre and back again takes more than a couple of dozen milliseconds, things start to break down, especially for the frantic action games that dominate the best-seller charts.

Another issue is that data-flow created by a game can change unpredictably. While music- and film-streaming services can “buffer”—fetching the next few minutes of content before it is needed, to guard against connection hiccups—video games cannot. Connections must be rock solid.”

Don’t forget about the importance of the games themselves. Good content is the lifeblood of consoles and gaming platforms. From The Economist.